Published on 18 June 2026 · by Qubit Technologies
What your company is worth on the black market
The question is not whether you are a target, it is how much what you have sells for. An email with a password, access to your network, your customer database. It all has a price on the black market, a price that explains why small companies get attacked too.
The objection we hear most when we talk to a small company is always the same. Why would anyone attack us if we are nobody, if we do not handle millions. It is a reassuring thought, but it rests on a mistake, because it assumes an attacker is after important companies.
An attacker is not after important companies, they are after things they can sell. Almost everything you have sells, even if to you it looks worthless. There is a whole market built for it, with its prices, its catalogues and its offers.
The catalogue and its prices
To give you an idea, in those markets a user with their email password sells for a few euros. A credit card with its details, for a bit more. A batch with thousands of customer records, for far less than you would think. The figures are not high, which is exactly where the business is, in the volume.
What goes up in price is access to a company. A way into your network, an account with permissions, one of those connections a supplier uses to get in, that is no longer a few euros. Access like that sells for hundreds, sometimes thousands, because whoever buys it knows what they can pull out once inside.
Why the small also sells
This is the part that is hard to swallow. Your company does not need to be big to make it into that catalogue, it only needs to have something someone else can resell. A handful of emails with passwords, a customer database, a way into your systems. Even the most modest business has all of that.
To the buyer, your size barely matters. Access to a company of twenty people is sold and bought exactly like any other goods. The buyer does not know you, has nothing against you, they just see an opportunity at a price that works out for them.
From cheap access to an expensive disaster
What makes this market dangerous is not the price, it is what comes next. Whoever sells the access is almost never the one who uses it for the big hit. Some people do nothing but break in, collect accesses and put them up for sale. Someone else buys them for the next step.
That hundred-euro access someone bought on a Tuesday is the door a ransomware comes through three weeks later. The first only opened the lock, the second is the one who encrypts your systems and demands the ransom. You notice nothing until they are already inside, because the moment they sold you went by without a sound.
What that price really tells you
Your access being worth little is not good news, it is the opposite. It means getting into your company is cheap. Whatever is cheap gets tried a lot. No special motivation is needed to come after you, it just has to be profitable, something that at these prices it almost always is.
The way to change that maths is not to be unreachable, that does not exist. It is to make getting in cost more than your access is worth on the market. When breaking into your company takes more effort than anyone will pay for what is inside, the attacker moves on to the next on the list.
Knowing what your access is worth out there is a very concrete way to understand why it pays to look before someone else does, which is exactly what we talked about in why auditing costs less than ignoring it. The first step to not being sold is knowing what you have left open.
If you want to know what your company exposes today and what it would cost to break in, write to us at [email protected].